As you may have realized (with frustration!) by now, we have limited options for evaluating the expressive communication skills of children who are minimally verbal. Enter: the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS), designed to measure just that. Prior papers have described the development of the CCS and determined its validity and reliability, but in this study, we get to see it in action with a peer-mediated intervention.

First, a little bit about the tool. It’s a coding scale—not a standardized assessment—that can be used during observations. Because prelinguistic communication skills often take time to develop with this population, this tool helps us think about all the incremental steps along the way and accounts for the variety of communicative modes the children might use. It’s a 12-point scale following this pattern:

The researchers found that the CCS could measure improvement in overall communication complexity and behavior regulationfor preschoolers with autism after a peer-mediated intervention (the same one we reviewed here!).

So far in the research, the CCS has only been used during structured tasks meant to elicit communicative responses (see the supplemental material), such as holding a clear bag with toys where the child can see it, but can’t access it independently. We know it's crucial to observe our students in natural communication opportunities, though, so we'd have to be a little flexible in using the CCS during unstructured observations. The scale could definitely be useful when describing communication behaviors during evaluations or when monitoring progress. Wouldn’t it be much more helpful to say “The child consistently stopped moving (i.e. changed her behavior) in response to the wind-up toy stopping” instead of “The child was not observed to demonstrate joint attention”? Using the CCS, we have new ways of describing those “small” behaviors that really aren’t small at all!

NOTE: This study crosses over our Early Intervention vs. Preschool cut-offs, with kids from 2 to 5 years old. So for those of you who also read the Early Intervention section, we’ll publish this there next month! Just giving you the heads-up so you don’t feel like it’s Groundhog Day :)